Data centre revenue, its growth and a move toward cloud computing have increased data centre dependency, with no predictable end in sight. And, with the global economy not headed in an ideal direction, this paints a possible bleak picture for the local environment.

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end intelligent interconnect solutions, is therefore focusing its support on organisations operating in Africa in a bid to enhance the continent's productivity and competitiveness amidst a sluggish economic, insufficient infrastructure and the lack of a stable power supply.

According to Syd Virdi, director, EMEA channel distribution at Mellanox Technologies, the company's end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure are designed to boost data centre ROI – a positive for any business already operating on the continent or planning to expand its footprint.

Mellanox' distinguishing technology is its Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). "Very simply, when using the InfiniBand protocol, RDMA allows data to be transferred between computing systems without impacting either of the systems' computational power," continues Virdi. "Return on capital employed, or RDMA over converged Ethernet, essentially brings these performance benefits to the world of Ethernet thus enabling high throughput, low latency networking."

He also points out that it is the low-latency, high-performance, and efficient CPU utilisation provided by Mellanox Ethernet solutions, coupled with the economic benefits of consolidation, performance boosts, simplified management, and network virtualization, which can in particular help southern African end-customers build out their applications in the most cost-effective manner.

Mellanox today distributes its solutions across 20 African countries via Networks Unlimited, a value-added distributor of converged technology-, data centre-, networking-, and security technology solutions.

Instances where Mellanox solutions have been successfully deployed in Africa include high performance computing environments, such as those found in manufacturing, oil and gas, and financial trading systems industries.

"Our partnership with Mellanox has enabled us to realise our strategy to directly provide the African market – were bandwidth demand is growing rapidly – with true technology innovation at a reasonable price," adds Anton Jacobsz, managing director at Networks Unlimited.

Virdi concludes: "During tough times, companies need efficient and reliable networks that can keep systems running at a reasonable cost while interpreting data faster than ever, in order to provide an edge in business value. In a world of ever-increasing data, this speedy transfer of all that data is critical to its more efficient use. It is here that Mellanox Technologies can help to enable IT managers to deliver significantly higher application service levels, while reducing CapEx and OpEx related to I/O infrastructures. This is ideal for boosting data centre efficiency, reducing overall complexity, and increasing data delivery performance."